GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M380, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M380 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (36%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB should be a small bit (approximately 18%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7232 (18%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M380 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4192 (36%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.